The World Mirror: In-Depth Analyses of International Issues

By Zhao Jinglun

Zhao Jinglun, a native of China who spent a third of his life in the United States, leads you on a fascinating journey focusing on Sino-U.S. relations and other world issues.

Whether its Barack Obamas bid to gain more leverage in the Asia-Pacific region, the disturbing beginnings of a surveillance state, or the drone war being waged by the United States on multiple fronts, he tackles the issues that other commentators shy away from and poses solutions to bolster relations and resolve conflicts.

He also exposes the true nature of Shinzo Abes right-wing Japanese government, its brazen denial of Japans war crimes, and its undisguised plan to revive Japanese militarism.

Youll also learn about other major world issues, including the civil war in Syria, the military coup in Egypt, Mali and the fight for Africa, and other conflicts that will shape the future of the world we live in. His views often differ sharply from those promoted by his home country or leaders in the United States, but he offers keen insights on finding common ground by learning from the past and looking into The World Mirror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491729946

Zhao Jinglun

ZHAO JINGLUN, a native of Suzhou, China, earned a bachelor’s degree from National Southwest Associated University, a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University, and was taking classes in Harvard University’s doctorate program before his studies were interrupted by the Korean War. He has held numerous academic and research positions and has written for numerous publications. He has been a columnist for China.org.cn since October 2012.

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Part I

Sino-US Relations

Obama in China’s Backyard

Following his re-election, the first overseas trip U.S. President Barack Obama made was to Southeast Asia, where he chalked up three firsts: He became the first sitting American president to visit Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, and Cambodia. He was also the first sitting American president to attend the East Asia Summit. His trip also included Thailand, America’s longtime ally.

Why was he in China’s backyard? According to the Washington Post, one of his advisors was quoted as saying that a renewed focus on Asia will be a critical part of the president’s second term and ultimately his foreign policy legacy.

During his second term in office, a U.S. president does not have to worry about re-election, and can therefore concentrate on doing what he has really wanted to do in order to ensure his legacy.

Obama’s major strategic shift has been to exit Iraq and Afghanistan and rebalance to the Asia-Pacific. His administration is using the Asia trip as another step in its pivot to Asia aimed at strengthening US strategic, security and economic ties in the Asia-Pacific region and counterbalancing China’s growing influence.

He traveled with his secretary of state Hillary R. Clinton, who is set to retire as soon as her successor is found. Their first stop was Bangkok, where they met with the Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, and paid a courtesy call on the hospitalized King Bhumibol Adulyadlej of Thailand.

As the American president’s trip took him out of Washington just as negotiations over the looming fiscal cliff heat up, he needed to pray for good luck. So they also visited the Royal Monastery where he hoped to take whatever good vibes the head Buddhist monk could give him.

Prior the president’s arrival, U.S. Secretary of Defense Panetta was in Bangkok to sign a Joint Vision Statement for Thai-US defense alliance with his counterpart ACM Sukumpol Suwanatad, the Thai defense minister.

So, three top U.S. officials were all in Asia to make an all-star team.

Obama and Hillary were in Burma (the administration still refuses to use the country’s new name Myanmar) for six hours. This segment was billed as the political centerpiece of their trip, perhaps due to Burma’s strategic location bordering China. In Yangon, they met with President Thein Sein, who flew from the regional meeting of ASEAN in Cambodia to meet them. They also visited the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and Obama gave a speech at the University of Yangon.

The Obama administration has bet heavily on Burma, relaxing some sanctions after Hillary visited the country and appointed Ambassador Derek Mitchell to Yangon. On this trip, Obama announced that US will establish in Burma a U.S. Agency for International Development mission and offer the country up to $170 million in new foreign aid over the next two years.

In Phnom Penh, Obama said he was there to attend the East Asia summit, not to interact with the host. He did not apologize for American warplanes’ carpet bombing of Cambodia four decades ago that kill half a million Cambodians. But four days before he arrived there, his defense secretary Panetta was in Phnom Penh to reaffirm the United States’ military ties with the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

While competing with China for friends in Southeast Asia, Obama was selling his TPP, a trade bloc that excludes China. There were few eager takers. Thailand, for instance, is worried that jointing the TPP might hurt, instead of help their economy.

On the other hand, ten Southeast Asian nations announced in Phnom Penh that they would begin negotiating a sweeping trade pact creating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that would include China and five of the region’s other major trading partners but not the United States. The new bloc would start in 2015 and would cover half of the world’s population.

In trade competition, the United States is at a disadvantage, as every country in the region except the Philippines does more business with China than with the United States.

So, for America’s own interest in the long run, it would be better for her to work out a new-type big power relationship with China, as was suggested by China’s new leader Xi Jinping.

November 25, 2012

US Senate Takes Fateful Step

On November 29, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2013. Under that amendment, the disputed Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands are officially put under the protection of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.

The purpose of the Defense Authorization Act is to specify a budget and expenditures for the Defense Department. It is unusual for it to actually mention territorial disputes between other nations. The conservative right wing in the Senate did this unusual act to boost the already brazen Japanese Right. It worsens a dangerous situation and could provoke a military conflict that neither the United States nor China wants.

The amendment, to be sure, needs to be approved by the House and signed by President Obama. But its chances of becoming law must be taken seriously.

The United States is behind the island dispute in the first place. The Chinese first discovered and named the Diaoyu Islands. Japan grabbed them only after defeating the Qing court in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. After WW II, Japan, as the defeated aggressor, was required by both the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation to surrender territories obtained from aggression and revert to their pre-1895 legal status. Instead, at the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, at which China was not invited as a signatory, the U.S. received administrative rights over the Diaoyu Islands and later transferred those rights to Japan. China never recognized that illicit transfer.

The dispute flared up when Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda nationalized the islands with U.S. acquiescence. The U.S. declared time and again that it takes no position on the ultimate sovereignty of the territory. Then came the contradictory declaration that article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Security Pact applies to the Diaoyu Islands, first by Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton; not through her own but through the mouth of her Japanese counterpart.

Now the U.S. Senate is trying to make it law of the land that must be followed. Who are the sponsors of the amendment? First, there is Jim Webb of Virginia, a former Secretary of the Navy. He was supported by three other Senators: James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of 38 Republican senators who shamefully voted against the UN Treaty on the Rights of the Disabled; Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the pro-Israel super hawk, who was a Democrat but became Independent and supported the Republican candidate McCain against Obama during the 2008 presidential elections. He followed McCain like a shadow throughout the campaign; and John McCain of Arizona himself, regarded as a war hero. He was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years in Hanoi Hilton. There was no war that he and his pal Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina did not like. He famously clamored for the U.S. to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!

Why did they do this? The United States, an established power, does not know how to handle China, a rising power. So it stirs up conflicts between China and its neighbors to create a tense situation that would hold back China’s explosive growth. But playing with fire is dangerous. Low intensity conflicts can intensify and get out of control. So how far will the U.S. go?

It wants to reward Japan for doing the dirty work on its behalf. But the rise of Japan’s Right Wing threatens not only China, but peace in the region and the entire world. Have Americans forgotten Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march? The notorious rightist Ishihara Shintaro not only wants to fight China, he also wants to throw the United States out of Japan.

Shinzo Abe, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, is another prominent rightist and no less dangerous. He has no qualms about visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which holds memorial tablets of fourteen Class A war criminals. And he wants to upgrade Japan’s Self-Defense Force to National Defense Force status by revising the Constitution. That would be a serious step on Japan’s road back to militarism that brought disaster to the world.

U.S. Senate maybe lifting a rock to crush its own toes.

December 12, 2012

The US Should Work with China

Work with China, Don’t Contain It wrote Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in The New York Times. Nye is a Harvard professor and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, as well as the famous advocate of soft power. What impressed me was his fine baritone voice, and I commented on it when my wife was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, class of 1984. He was puzzled and replied, Is that a compliment? (Or a back-handed jab?)

Either way, his is a very sensible and straight forward advice for the Obama administration. Containment is outdated. George Kennan himself regretted that successive U.S. administrations had opted for a military, rather than political containment of the Soviet Union.

As Jo Nye pointed out, China is not like the former Soviet Union. It is not seeking global hegemony. Let me add that it does not want to overthrow the world order dominated by the United States, because it is a beneficiary of that order. It only wants to change those parts of that order that are unfair to developing countries. Above all, it has vast, intricate and growing trade and economic relations with the United States which are mutually beneficial. The former Soviet Union never had that kind of relationship with the United States. China’s rapid growth serves as a vital engine driving the world economy forward. And Washington knows that.

Jo Nye also mentioned that The world’s two largest economies have much to gain from cooperation in fighting climate change, pandemics, cyber-terrorism and nuclear proliferation. To this list, I would also like to add Islamic terrorism and transnational criminal activities, like drug trafficking.

Nevertheless, China has reason to be wary of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia and the Pacific, which has a very considerable military component in it. Washington is aiding and abetting Tokyo’s resurgent militarism.

Just as Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell was calling for cooler heads in the dispute over the Diaoyu Islands, the hothead Hillary R. Clinton’s parting shot was particularly reckless when she declared not only that the U.S.-Japan Security Pact applies to China’s Diaoyu Islands, but that the U.S. would oppose any unilateral action that would undermine Japan’s administration of the islands. That is pouring oil on the fire. That stood in glaring contradiction to her statement that the U.S. held no position as on the islands ultimate sovereignty. She was, of course, speaking for the administration.

Mutual trust is obviously lacking when Washington played hard ball, blocking Chinese investments in the U.S. Washington, on the pretext of national security, scuttled Sany Group’s desire to acquire a wind farm in Oregon and Superior Aviation Beijing Co.’s proposal to buy Hawker-Beechcraft. A congressional report also warned that China’s Huawei and ZTE telecom companies pose security risks. Huawei already had a prior history of its proposed acquisition of American companies being shot down by US regulators.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York (my wife, a New Yorker, did not vote for him) even asked the administration to block the acquisition of Canada’s Nexen Inc. by China’s CNOOC. He failed. The Canadian government finally approved that takeover.

In addition, Washington has frequently resorted to anti-dumping and anti-subsidy penalties against Chinese companies.

It is to the credit of Washington that it did not designate China as a currency manipulator. Exchange rates hardly play any role in America’s trade imbalance with China. It is United States’ prohibition of exports of high-tech equipment to China that constitutes a contributing factor. The recent declaration of relaxation of controls, unfortunately, does not apply to China.

In spite of frictions, the sphere of cooperation between China and the United States is enormous. Nye’s suggestion that U.S. help China develop domestic energy resources such as shale gas sounds interesting. Recent development of the technology in hydraulic fracturing, especially horizontal slickwater fracking, looks very promising. It may even change the overall picture of world energy supply.

Let’s hope our two great nations cooperate and compete. Not fight.

January 28, 2013

The Thief Crying Stop Thief

Barely a week after President Barack Obama announced in his State of the Union message that he had signed an executive order to strengthen our cyber defenses, Washington accused Beijing of hacking into the computers of American companies and other organizations, and even pin pointed to a Shanghai building that houses PLA Unit 61398 as the source of cyber attack.

The accusation was solely based on a report by a private cyber security firm Mandiant that offered the flimsiest evidence. For instance, it claimed that the intruder used a Shanghai phone number to register an e mail account. But that proves absolutely nothing. So are all the other evidence offered by Mandiant.

Analysts point out that cyber-security is not a science, but an industry: that is, the entities issuing alarming reports of those lurking threats are for profit companies mainly if not exclusively concerned with selling a product. So Mandiant is talking with The New York Times, a self-proclaimed victim, for a contract to protect the latter’s computers.

As Jeffrey Carr, founder of a cyber security firm and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, points out: It’s good business to blame China. I know from experience that many corporations, government and DoD organizations are more eager to buy cyber threat data that claims to focus on the PRC than any other nation state. When the cyber security industry issues PRC-centric reports like this one without performing any alternative analysis of the collected data, and when the readership of these reports are government and corporate officials without the depth of knowledge to critically analyze what they’re reading, . . . we wind up being in the position that we’re in today—easily fooled into looking in one direction when we have an entire threat landscape left unattended.

More than thirty nations are currently running military-grade operations, as Carr noted. And there are non-state actors such as criminal gangs that also launch cyber attacks. And the U.S. chose to pick on China.

Both the PLA and China’s Foreign Ministry have denied the accusation and stated that in fact China has been the victim of cyber attacks, and most of the attacks originated in the United States. According to Qian Xiaoqian, vice minister of the State Council Information Office, 4.5 million PCs in the country had been attacked by Trojan viruses from IPs abroad in 2010, an increase of more than sixteen times from 2009. China opposes any kind of hacker attacks and cyberspace armament race. During the fifth US-China Internet Industry Forum in Washington on December 7 and 8, 2011, China proposed an opposition to any internet war or cyber armament race.

The US is the only country that has a Cyber Command led by Gen. Keith Alexander. US Department of Defense is reportedly to have been busily revamping its current cyber-warfare capabilities and steadily building up its cadre of cyber warriors. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta himself acknowledged US has the capacity to wage offensive cyber warfare.

According to Time Magazine, US officials don’t like to acknowledge that the Pentagon is hard at work developing an offensive cyber capability. In fact it has begun using that capability to wage war. Beyond shutting down enemy systems, the U.S. military is crafting a witch’s brew of stealth, manipulation and falsehoods designed to lure the enemy into believing he is in charge of his forces when in fact they have been secretly enlisted as allies of the US military.

Time says the US Air Force wants the ability to burrow into any computer system anywhere in the world. And the U.S. cyber warriors’ goal is complete functional capabilities of an enemy’s computer network—from U.S. military keyboards. The magazine quotes William Owens, a retired admiral and cyber expert, I have no doubt we’re doing some very profoundly sophisticated thing on the attack side.

So the thief needs to cry Stop thief! so as to divert attention away from its own cyber war ambitions.

February 25, 2013

Balancing the US, China and Japan

The strategic balance between the United States, China and Japan—a stable trilateral relationship— is of vital importance to regional and global peace and stability. Unfortunately, Japan provoked a sharp conflict with China over the Diaoyu Islands.

That has created a dangerous crisis situation threatening to get out of control.

Fortunately, the United States, which first aided and abetted Japan’s right wing in its attempts to secure the Diaoyu Islands especially during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, thought better and tried to cool Japan down. During Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to Washington, he received no additional support from the White House, and was forced to declare he would handle the dispute in a reserved manner. The manner in which he had acted hitherto was anything but reserved. Washington obviously does not want to be dragged by Tokyo into the mire of open conflict with Beijing.

It is rather unusual for the right-wing Wall Street Journal to publish an open letter from the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Auslin to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just before the latter’s Washington visit, asking him to tell Mr. Obama that Japan will never fire the first shot [over the disputed islands], nor endanger civilian life.

The trilateral relationship is complex and its imbalance can only be understood by considering the basic trends of development. Among these, the most important is China’s historic rise that has changed the power relationship among the three. Even though the United States is still the most powerful nation in the world economically, politically and especially militarily, its relative influence is on the decline. As for Japan, it has lost twenty years of economic growth and yielded second place in world economic rankings to China in 2010. That fact has had an enormous impact on Japan’s national psyche.

As a result of these developments, the United States has decided to pivot to Asia and the Pacific (Obama himself never used the term pivot. Analysts prefer the term rebalance). Both the US and Japan are promoting the theory of the China threat. To contain that threat, the United States is to deploy in 2017 all three stealth planes, the F-22, F-35 and B-2 to bases near China. By 2020, sixty percent of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to fifty percent today).

However, the nation’s budget woes put that plan in doubt. And the US is increasingly dependent on the contribution of its allies, Japan in particular. That plays into the scheme of Abe’s right wing government. During his Washington visit, Abe said he and Mr. Obama agreed that the security alliance between Japan and the United States is back on track after a period of occasional bumps during the past three years when his long-ruling LDP was in opposition. He told Obama Japan will boost its defenses.

News reports did not mention any discussion of Abe’s plan to gain the right to collective self-defense and upgrade the Self Defense Forces to a National Defense Force by revising Japan’s pacific Constitution. Some analysts were overly optimistic about this. They interpret this as U.S. opposition to Abe’s plan. They seem to be unaware of the fact that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye, Jr. advocated Tier I status for Japan in a report sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) last August.

They argued that the US-Japan alliance